Combine salt, garlic powder, thyme, ginger, and pepper. Rub over entire roast. Place roast in crockpot or greased roasting pan. Glaze: Combine brown sugar and cornstarch in a saucepan. Stir in remaining glaze ingredients. (If you are going to cook the meat in the crockpot, substitute 1/3 cup additional orange juice for the water). Bring to a boil. Cook and stir for 2 minutes.If baking pork loin in oven: Bake, covered, 1 hour at 325 degrees. Uncover, brush some of the glaze on roast, re-cover, and bake 1 3/4 more hours (or until a meat thermometer reads 160 degrees), uncovering and brushing with glaze approximately every 1/2 hour. Let stand 10 minutes, then slice and serve with remaining glaze (re-warm in microwave or saucepan if desired).If cooking pork loin in crockpot: Pour prepared glaze over rubbed pork loin. Turn crockpot on low and cook 8-10 hours or until meat thermometer reads 160 degrees. During cooking process, uncover and baste with juice/glaze approximately every 3 hours. Remove from crockpot. Cover and let stand 10 minutes. Slice, then serve with juices/glaze from crockpot.Serve with rice or potatoes and a vegetable (such as Oven-Roasted Asparagus).

Options and Tips

If a half pork loin is an overwhelming amount of food for your family, just cut it in half and freeze half of it before cooking/baking.

If you decide to bake only half of the half pork loin, total oven time should be only 2 1/4 hours instead of 2 3/4 hours.

I have used pineapple juice in place of orange juice with equally yummy results.

4 comments:

This pork loin was delicous. I put it in the crockpot at midnight Sat. night and we ate shortly after noon Sunday. Sunday night we had the pork on buns and on Monday I made the barbequed pulled pork on buns. Also delicious. Thank you, very, very good. Ann Daling

I tend to use my crockpot more because I know there's a guaranteed moist and tender result even if I leave it in for an extra hour. Oven-cooking is just a little trickier (at least for me!) because you can dry out the meat by leaving it in for too long. However, if you have a meat thermometer you can use that to prevent overcooking in the oven. One benefit to the oven method: your sauce will be a little more flavorful, because the moisture in the crockpot tends to water down the sauce just a little bit.